


Serious Moonlight

by gin_eater



Series: Deep Sea Divers [5]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Recreational Drug Use, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:46:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cruella and Ursula navigate the wreckage of their relationship in 1980s New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Serious Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Written post-Poor Unfortunate Soul, before it was revealed that Sea Devil and Lily arrived together in the LWM, hence why she doesn't warrant so much as a passing thought (not that canon ever implied she felt any guiltier about leaving her behind than Cruella did, anyway).

Ursula should really be more disgusted than she is.

The environments that these people, these powerless, ordinary, run-of-the-mill _humans_ will voluntarily choose to both produce and occupy are, without a doubt, repulsive. Three years into her expatriation from the Enchanted Forest, and the way they behave still astounds her. If this world died tomorrow, it would be found with a needle still in its arm.

Places like this are the worst, choked with multitude flavors of pollution – smoke, noise, polyester, aerosol hairspray, American beer … the lifestyle equivalent of an oily sheen passing itself off as a rainbow.

Even so, she finds herself drawn here. She’d walked by one night, purely by chance, only to be reeled in by a tug of familiarity in the bass quaking just below street level, like a melody she was certain she’d heard before but couldn’t quite place, and couldn’t quite remember the words that went with it.

But a melody there is, even beyond the music that gets nightly piped through the speakers. There’s also sparkle, and illusion. There are men who look like women and women who look like men and both who look like neither and some who look like animals or aliens, and when the strobing light catches the smoke just so, the outlines of dragons can be seen. The people here, it’s like they _know_ – they _know_ something’s missing, and the ones who can’t ignore it are driven, in their bungling, primitive way, to create it themselves. To fill the void and mend the holes as best they can.

Places like this are the closest this world will ever get to magic.

It’s a Thursday evening when Ursula spots her across the room, when the white half of her hair flashes like a lamp in a lighthouse as she turns her head. She wasn’t expecting her, but she’s not exactly surprised to see her, either -  _of course_ Cruella would be drawn to places like this, too. Hell, with her flamboyant makeup and long, lanky frame, most of the men here probably take her for one of their own, and indeed she arrives in the midst of a small herd of false eyelashes, crop-tops and Aquanet, a queen borne on a tidal wave of queens. Ursula sips her drink and follows them with her eyes as they flock first to the bar and then around one of the tables on the outskirts of the dance floor. One of them cracks a joke, probably about another patron’s outfit or eyeliner, and there’s a round of catty laughter before a waitress arrives with a tray full of drinks, the majority of them some combination of neon and topped with an umbrella.

Cruella plucks an olive off the toothpick in her martini with her teeth, then rises and sashays in the direction of the toilets, and before she even knows what she’s doing, Ursula is up and following her through the door to what’s flexibly considered the ladies’ room.

Inside, Ursula’s is the only reflection in the mirror above the sinks, but a loud, unmistakable sniff comes from the only stall miraculously still in possession of a lock. A couple of small sniffles follow, and she leans against the wall, arms folded, and waits.

Cruella opens the stall door and freezes when she looks up and finds Ursula standing there. Her eyes are still watering, and it’s the most defenseless Ursula has ever seen her look – a momentary flash of how she might appear frightened and crying.

But Cruella isn’t really crying, and she isn’t really scared. Surprised, yes – she’s not wearing her coat, but the padded shoulders of her blazer give the impression of raised hackles just as well – but after the initial flash of alarm at finally being confronted by something she’s been avoiding, her bearing dims to one of mere suspicion cloaked in the usual jaded nonchalance. She’s expecting a lecture, no doubt, or perhaps even for Ursula to spit at her feet; what she’s unprepared for is Ursula asking if she has an extra bump, and the former sea witch tries not to smile at having caught her off her guard twice in as many minutes.

Composure recovered, Cruella says “Sure,” and fishes a little silver snuff vial on a chain out of a pocket in her jacket lining. It’s shaped like a bullet and studded with red and white gems that are, if Ursula knows Cruella, not only real but fresh out of a war zone, to boot.

Conscious that she’s being watched, Ursula unscrews the lid and lifts its tiny attached spoon to her nose. It’s good coke, she can tell as soon as it hits her system; but then, it’s Cruella – Ursula’s probably just snorted what would, to her, be a month’s rent. She shivers once when the bitter taste hits the back of her tongue, wipes at her nose with her thumb, then caps and returns the vial.

She blames the drug for the way her heart pounds when their fingers brush with the exchange.

“Thanks,” she says, and Cruella smiles, pupils blown so wide they’re limned with barely a hairsbreadth of her ghostly blue irises.

“Anytime, darling.”

Ursula exits the bathroom first, brushing past a middle-aged Madonna with a young Cher in tow on their way in. She should really leave the club altogether – she’s made her point and made it well, keeping the upper hand on her dignity, proving to both Cruella and herself that she’s doing perfectly fine here, that she’s enduring on her own and very little the worse for wear, aside from the few unfortunately necessary physical adaptations.

Instead she heads to the bar for another Cuba libre, and she blames the coke for that, too. She needs the taste out of her mouth, she thinks. She hasn’t been made overconfident by a mild euphoria, nor does she particularly want to linger to watch a woman with priorities so skewed Ursula wishes she still had her powers just to test the theory that Cruella could never survive without the ability to open her legs.

She doesn’t want to catch Cruella’s eye across the club every couple of minutes and read the reflection there of interest, doubt, and regret. She doesn’t want to stand up when a popular song by a man named for a knife starts playing, or make her way to the dance floor when Cruella and the gaggle of inebriated gay men she’s sitting with do the same.

She doesn’t want to see that lithesome body ripple in time to music that speaks of fallen grace and broken hearts, or to match its rhythm with her own when she threads between the hoi polloi to insinuate herself behind it. She doesn’t want to feel its momentary pause when she smooths her hands along the warm, flat plane of an imperiously trim waist, or the eventual answer of a familiar palm coming to rest at the nape of her neck, of red-lacquered nails spearing her hair to scrape gently at her scalp. She doesn’t want the mingling scents of cigarette smoke, dirty martinis and French perfume to blot out her rational mind like a cloud of ink in water. She doesn’t want the give of soft skin between her teeth, or to know how she can hear the quiet gasp of the bitten above the cacophony of the club.

She doesn’t want to follow when Cruella suddenly grabs her by the hand and leads her hastily off the dance floor, up the stairs, and out under David Bowie’s serious moonlight. She doesn’t want to, but she does all of those things, and the thought that she probably wouldn’t if she were sober is a flyspeck figure on a distant shore, much too far away to be heard distinctly. The memories she heeds now are older than that, older and much, much stronger. If there’s one thing about this world that matches the one Ursula was born into, it is its ruthlessness. Take what you can; give nothing back.

Cruella flags down a cab with a cultivated wave of jewel-spangled fingers, and doesn’t let go of Ursula’s hand until they’re piled inside and the door is securely shut behind them.

“The Helmsley, darling,” she directs the driver, slipping a fifty dollar bill through the plexiglass partition, “and do be quick about it.”

A pair of red-rimmed eyes glance at them in the rearview mirror.

“You got it, _darlin’,_ ” their owner drawls, and steers the car expertly into a brief niche in the traffic.

“The Helmsley,” Ursula repeats. “Is that where you’re being kept these days?”

Cruella fixes her with an exasperated glower, the first she’s actually looked at her since before they started dancing, and her cheeks are flushed with more than just a gin blossom.

“ _Must_ you spoil this already?” she demands.

No, Ursula decides. Of all the things she hasn’t wanted to do tonight, to end this prematurely would go at the top of that list, and this time she finds it easy to follow through on the denial.

“Spoil what?” she asks, and between them it’s as good as an apology. Better than that, it’s an invitation – one Cruella only sighs once at, for show, before accepting.

The cabbie has seen a lot in his day, and certainly more than his fair share of horny, impatient couples eager to soil his backseat with the byproducts of (usually) human lust, but even he finds the prospect of two gorgeous women trying to devour each other alive a rare treat, and nearly ass-ends a Mercedes in front of him when he misses a red light in favor of the spectacle unfolding – practically undressing – behind him in the mirror.

The car lurches violently when he slams on the brakes, and the two women almost topple to the floor. As one, they pin him with matching glares, and in an instant he’s more than embarrassed – he’s _afraid._ Being a taxi driver in New York City is a dangerous business this day and age: he’s lost more than one friend to petty thieves who think a gun in their hand makes them Al Capone. These women are unarmed, as far as he can tell, but their gazes could be gun barrels for the chill that runs down his spine when they’re aimed at him.

“Eyes on the road, please, darling,” the skinny one intones in a rough, low voice like the deceptive purr of a big cat.

The cabbie does as he’s told for the rest of the drive, steadfastly ignoring the urgent, wet noises at his back, the hums and the moans and the escalating breaths. When finally he drops them at the requested hotel, he counts himself a lucky man that he’s still alive, and passes their sizable tip along to the bartender at the taphouse where he stops next to get a drink of his own, although it doesn’t stop the dreams from coming – dreams in which he is in a very cold, very dark, very deep-feeling place, being circled on all sides by things unseen, things that both slither and howl.

The lobby of the New York Helmsley Hotel is already a monument to the geometric opulence of the nascent decade, and Cruella fits right in amongst its contemporary group patterns and clean, postmodern lines. For all the former witch adores her furs, that she herself is best camouflaged by artificiality calls her out as a natural born predator of animals that walk on two legs, not four – or eight, come to that.

Ursula misses her tentacles tremendously. Three years, and she still finds herself curving a hip to reach for something when her hands are full. It’s as though an invisible glove has enveloped her senses, muffling and blurring the outside world. Cruella doesn’t understand, of course. She’d even taken it as a slight against herself when Ursula lamented that nothing felt as good as it used to between them. She hadn’t at all understood that Ursula literally couldn’t feel the same way that she had before, and when Ursula had tried to explain more fully, Cruella had been affronted by the idea that a merely human experience of sex wasn’t good enough – that all of the things Cruella found overwhelmingly pleasurable about being with Ursula, extra appendages or no, didn’t translate evenly to what Ursula felt when she was with Cruella; that Cruella herself was somehow the deficient one by not having been born a goddess, and without her magic to keep things interesting, was failing to measure up.

The whole argument had been a parable of selfish misunderstanding on both their parts, and the way they had dealt with the fallout – or failed to deal – was just as egocentric. But they’d cut each other to the quick at their most vulnerable points, and name the villain who’s ever been renowned for their healthy coping skills in the face of deep pain, insecurity and loss.

So Cruella had run, trawling every upscale bar in the city until she found the first in a series of loaded and lonely men in the market for a mistress with just as much to offer in conversation as concupiscence, which didn’t take very long at all; and Ursula had hidden, clamming up inside their tiny apartment, silently and tearlessly disposing of Cruella’s few inexpensive, just-until-we’re-on-our-feet-darling possessions down the garbage chute on the day her fur coat finally disappeared for good from its place in their shared closet.

It still hurts, but it’s a wound Ursula can ignore as long as she doesn’t touch it, although by all accounts it should be smarting like a bastard right now, all over Cruella as she is inside the privacy of an empty elevator, her hands finding all the places they’ve known before and feeling … feeling as much as they can. The fabric of Cruella’s suit is coarser than her skin, but her skin is warmer. Her mouth tastes like lipstick and olives and alcohol and the strange non-taste of flesh. Her teeth are smooth, her tongue softly textured. Her hair is like silk, and the black strands slightly thicker than the white. It’s enough, Ursula thinks: it’s enough, for one night, to throw her feelings at the wall and see what sticks, and what does stick is enough to focus on that she can ignore the ghosts of what’s painted underneath. It’s enough because she needs it to be. Because she wants this too badly to acknowledge that, truthfully, it’s not enough at all.

The elevator reaches their floor with a tastefully subdued chime, and they manage to more or less separate by the time the doors open, although in their disheveled, smeared and breathless state Ursula wonders who hell they would fool with the handful of inches now between them.

Fortunately, the hallway is void of potential dupes, and is a lot smaller than Ursula expected – more of an antechamber than a hallway, really. Cruella notices her puzzled expression and smiles proudly, leading her to one of only four doors in the room.

“Presidential suite, darling,” she explains, cheekily producing a key from her bra that Ursula is sure she should have felt at some point in the past fifteen minutes – but then, Cruella’s always been crafty as a fox when it comes to caching things, and nearly as compulsive. Just last month Ursula found what she’d assumed was once a baggie of sour cream and onion potato chips hidden in the lining of her sofa, most likely from a movie night long past. The maids here can clean all they like: ten years from now a renovator will still end up very confused as to how a packet of cinnamon licorice twists ended up stashed in the shower head.

“Meaning you have to shell out a lot of dead ones to stay here?” she quips.

Cruella shrugs, tugging her inside. “Or be sleeping with a majority shareholder of a Fortune 500 company.”

“Now who’s spoiling the mood?”

She shouldn’t have said that. It was warranted, but she shouldn’t have said it. Cruella’s frozen one step away from her, eyes glittering angrily, and they’re both already running too high and too hot, with mutual grievances percolating too long, and Ursula doesn’t want this fight, not yet – not ever. Their story may be a tragedy but she doesn’t want the book to close. She thinks she’d write it forever if it meant she never had to write _The End._

She clenches her fists, bracing herself as the words leap off Cruella’s sharp tongue to blow the chasm that divides them irreparably wider.

“No more talking, then.”

Ursula blinks.

“What?” she wants to ask, “ _what?_ ” But Cruella’s mouth is already making good on her statement. The gap between them narrows into nothing and Ursula is suddenly furious, furious that _now_ is when Cruella gives in? _Now_ is when she makes concessions and _listens_ for the sake of what’s between them? _Now,_ when the pathetic, scrawny thread that is their bond is too brackish with acrimony for anything meaningful to _actually fucking live there?_

But she tears at Cruella’s fancy clothes instead of her throat, leaving a trail of beautifully cut black linen and skimpy red lace to wrinkle on the floor, and she shoves her up against the wall to keep from walking her out the balcony door and pushing her over the goddamn railing. Even without her tentacles, Ursula’s stronger, more solidly built, and physically manipulating the slighter woman has always proven easy – not least because Cruella has a penchant for being handled roughly. “I’m gilded, darling, not glass,” she said during their first encounter, when Ursula was rather more interested in mapping her new discovery than outright conquering it.

Conquest, however, sounds pretty fucking good right now, and it feels even better when she turns the slender woman to face the wall, bends her double and licks a long line from the small of her back to between her shoulder blades. Cruella’s always been a fantastically forthcoming lover, blissfully uninhibited in the face of sensual gratification, and time and rancor have done nothing to moderate her responses: she cries out with abandon when Ursula slips two fingers inside of her and curls them hard, slender hips bucking unabashedly into the pressure of Ursula’s palm.

Ursula rocks with her as Cruella squirms, keeping the plunge of her fingertips shallow but firm, holding their rhythm steady. With her free hand, she reaches around to knead Cruella’s breasts in turn, scissoring peaked nipples between index and middle fingers. Cruella keens and pushes back against her, arches so that the slope of her neck is bared to Ursula’s teeth and lips, one hand gripping Ursula’s wrist between her legs, the other tangling in blonde waves as her breathing turns fast and loud and Ursula wonders if Mr. Fortune 500 has ever gotten her off this hard or this quickly or at all, because in the next few seconds Cruella is shuddering in her arms with what can only be described as a sob of relief and an intensity that takes Ursula’s breath away, knees buckling, thighs shut tight and trembling around Ursula’s hand while her cunt throbs hotly around Ursula’s fingers.

Together they sink to the floor, Cruella on her hands and knees, whimpering a little as slowly, slowly, the tremors of her body wane, and her heaving breaths sublimate into quieter sighs. She presses her forehead to the hotel’s plush carpeting when Ursula at last takes her hand away, then inhales sharply and whirls to face her erstwhile lover with bright, refreshed eyes and a decadently delighted smile. Now would be the time for praise, for a happy joke or a witty little interlude, but Ursula doesn’t want to hear it. These aren’t the old days and she doesn’t want to leave this place with hope anymore than she does with finality. This world is a limbo to them, and for now, between aftermath and atonement is where they need to stay.

She places a damp finger against Cruella’s lips and reminds her, “No more talking, remember?”

Whatever genuine disappointment Cruella might feel is promptly masked by a petulant roll of her eyes, but the kiss she presses to Ursula’s finger is both mocking and compliant.

It turns downright lascivious when she takes Ursula’s hand in both of hers and does more than kiss it, drawing Ursula’s first two fingers into her mouth and cleaning them of her own juices with a slow, exaggerated suck.

Ursula watches intently, and feels her heart drop an octave in the color of its beat. Cruella may adore being taken fast and filthy, but there are as many trappings strewn about her methods of reciprocation as there are in her wardrobe, and Ursula’s personal tastes have always run toward the embellished. She knows she can count every lick and nibble as a promise of what’s to come, and despite what all of the heroes back home might think, there are specific instances in which villains aren’t entirely without integrity.

Still keeping hold of Ursula’s hand, Cruella leans forward to capture her lips in a kiss that, under different circumstances, might be called loving – might be called tender and grateful and the kind of kiss that takes the place of wishing out loud that a moment could outlive its name – but these aren’t different circumstances, and when Cruella’s mouth takes its leave to trail down Ursula’s jawline and throat, Ursula hears an echo in the back of her mind like the remainders of a life falling down a garbage chute. It lands with a hollow plunk in the pit of her stomach and she pretends that it didn’t catch on her heart on its way down.

Cruella moves lower, gently pushing Ursula to lie back as she peppers her collarbones with kisses and bites, and traces the underside of one breast with her tongue. Ursula closes her eyes and tries to breathe in the sensations, tries through sheer force of will to know what Cruella tastes like through her skin (briny and astringent with sweat and perfume), to isolate the temperature of her hands as they mold themselves around the curves of Ursula’s hips (feverish and growing hotter). She’s nearly convinced herself that the memories are the here-and-now by the time Cruella’s teasing nips to the susceptible softness of her belly at last give way to the long, languid stroking of her tongue along Ursula’s slit, first the right side, then the left, summoning gasps and hissed curses from lungs no longer cecaelian as easily as she used to command dogs to heel.

It’s not the same, it’s not, but for tonight, at least, it _is_ enough – maybe because it’s been so long, maybe because she’s missed her so goddamn fucking much, but either way, Cruella licks and sucks and circles and thrusts until Ursula can’t see straight, until even this blunted body seems to grow a mind of its own and she’s writhing and almost fucking _wailing_ with every salaciously slick pattern with which Cruella paints her flesh. Her hands grope blindly for purchase on anything within reach, one of them finding the solid leg of a nearby table or chair, the other pressing grooves with her fingernails into the waxed denim of her own discarded jacket.

Her orgasm rises like a tidal wave inside of her and rides the length of her spine, bowing her back up off the floor as she tenses, rushing through her limbs when it breaks and floods her senses with something closer to bliss than she’s experienced in years.

She feels lightheaded and frothy in the afterglow, not unlike the first time she’d breathed air as a child, and she can’t quite tell if she’s surfacing or drowning. Cruella, kneeling now, is the beacon by which she regains her bearings. That lighthouse hair.

The lighthouse herself is licking her lips and wiping her chin with the back of her hand, a vulgar gesture just as appropriate as it is out-of-place being performed by a woman as equally feral as she is genteel.

“I know we said no more talking, darling, but I do hope you’ll grant me a reprieve if I say that you taste _exactly_ like an Olympia oyster.”

Ursula permits herself a wry smirk. “Never had one.”

“Never? _You?_ ” Cruella regards her for a long moment. Already, new lust begins to shine in her eyes. “Well, that _is_ a travesty that mustn’t go unremedied,” she says, then clambers to her feet and pads naked to a phone on an end table across the room. She picks up the receiver and pushes a button on the dial. “Hello, room service?”

Ursula finds out what Olympia oysters taste like. She finds out what the Manhattan skyline looks like at dawn when you can afford a decent view (nothing special), and relearns exactly how many muscles in a human body can be sore at the same time (all of them).

She already knew that Cruella will always be the biggest blanket hog in any world she occupies.

The curtains are drawn and the whole suite thickly shadowed when Ursula dons her rumpled clothing one piece at a time, following it like a trail of breadcrumbs from the bedroom to the door. She’s just finished lacing up her boots and is about to reach for the knob when something stays her hand.

It’s written in all the stories: don’t look back. Whatever you do, don’t look back.

But those stories are all about heroes. About people who can still make music poignant enough to soften the hearts of gods.

Ursula returns to the bedroom and lingers on the threshold. She drinks her visual fill of the overbearing woman whose midsection is swaddled in what must be miles of white duvet, wiry limbs splayed to arrogate as much of the too-large bed as they can reach. From this distance, the small but bright bruises that dot the alabaster skin of Cruella’s back and shoulders look as though they could have been made by a dozen little suction cups. Ursula wonders how she’ll explain them to the sugar daddy. Maybe she’ll find out down the road, whenever they meet again. She knows for a certainty that they will, and so when she opens her mouth, it’s not to say goodbye – it’s not to _say_ anything.

The notes come out flat and wrong, their power to ease suffering and bring joy as long dead as the woman whose soul they no longer contain, but the promise in them still rings true.

“ _Watch and you’ll see, someday I’ll be part of your world …_ ”

Cruella stirs but doesn’t wake, and Ursula leaves her to her caviar dreams.

She makes it through the door one step at a time.


End file.
